Insights To Live A Better Life
The Matrix. The Sixth Sense. Fight Club. The Insider. Magnolia. Need I say more. For various reasons, the last year of the millennium saw an outpouring of auteur-driven filmmaking. Movie genres were redefined: was The Sixth Sense a horror, thriller or ghost story? What was Fight Club or Being John Malkovich? And new genres were invented like the horror pseudo-documentary – The Blair Witch Project.
Continue reading “1999 – the Best Movie Year Ever”
Wabi-Sabi is NOT wasabi – the green splodge that you get with sushi and sends a shock wave up your sinuses. Instead, wabi-sabi is the Japanese concept of beauty in imperfection. Continue reading “Imperfecting Your Wabi-Sabi”
No matter what we believe, we are hardwired to be affected by emotions, even at work. I learnt this at a talk given by Joan Kingsley and Sue Paterson, authors of The Fear-free Organization
We often look to others to compare, contrast, and evaluate success or failure in our own lives, and this mindset can be an incredibly powerful creative and motivational force. It’s entrenched in our biology, that desire to strive higher than those who surround us, and facilitated readily in our social media culture – even celebrated. Yet the value of the comparison mindset can easily be outweighed by envy, jealousy, and a loss of self-worth, feelings which tear down others and eventually ourselves. But there are ways to guard against this – here are four:
Continue reading “Four Ways To Overcome the Comparison Mindset”We take ourselves far too seriously. We obsess about appearing faultless to others or we become wedded to our opinions (or both). Someone who never took himself seriously was the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988). Continue reading “Think Different: What is Fire? Stored Sun!”
Doomer, prepper, primitivist, romantic, survivalist, millennialist, catastrophist* : these are all types of people that believe one way or another that civilisation as we know it is coming to an end. Many take the next step and join or set up communities that would survive such an outcome. Dylan Evans was one such person. In 2006, he quit his job as an academic and sold his house to fund the “Utopia Experiment” – a post-apocalyptic styled community in the Highlands of Scotland. Continue reading “No Place Like Utopia”
I don’t naturally lean towards poetry, I prefer the straightforwardness of prose. At the same time, I know that poetry, like music, can affect me in ways a novel or film never could. So, I’m always on the look-out for entry points to poetry, and I recently found one in the works of Pablo Neruda.
Continue reading “Love Life, Love Poetry”
The challenge for a manned mission to Mars is neither cost nor technology, but coping with solitude. Imagine being stuck with the same people for two or three years in a confined space with minimal food, entertainment, and contact with Earth. Jason Stuster, a NASA research consultant, who studied the diaries of explorers to remote regions on earth such as the Antarctic found that many would fall into depression or suffer psychoses (think Tarkovsky’s movie “Solaris”)[1]. Continue reading “Could You Fly To Mars?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently, especially with my transition from corporate life to start-up life. While I’m comfortable with change most the time, I do occasionally need some words of support. For that, I find there’s no-one better than Lao-Tzu, the founder of Taoism, who lived 2,500 years ago. He wrote:
“life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like”
Continue reading “How To Think About Change”
Twenty years. That’s how long I worked in banking. Aside from a very brief and unhappy start in tech M&A, I’ve spent the entire time doing research. Initially, I focused on foreign exchange markets, before widening out to global economic themes and all markets. Along the way, I’ve grown as a person, had great teachers and made many friends.
Continue reading “Starting My New Adventure: Macro Hive With a Side Of Wellbeing”